Katja Novitskova
Friday, 9 May 2014
Work from Spirit, Curiosity, Opportunity.
“The objects found in this fossilised collection look like cubes, polygons, slots, arrows, round holes, bones, feathers and even artistic impressions. It may have resulted from a variation of the same basic process which forms fossils on Earth, where mud replaces organic material over time. There is a small possibility that some of the original artifacts are still present around the crater.
A few artifacts have been minimally sharpened or enlarged for clarity purposes only. No manual “pixel twiddling” was ever performed on any image in this exhibition. Panoramic camera source images for these artifacts were only available in JPEG form on the NASA archive servers.
Not all images here can be dismissed as natural rock formations. Red outlines show unusual shapes: note the indentations on the rocks in the back of the image (arrows). Could this be a fossilised life-form or a mechanical artifact? Perhaps these two heavily censored images of a scrambled sky and altered ground surface originally displayed real objects on the planet, which we are not allowed to see. This perfectly formed object is outlined by the sun’s shadow and resembles a bird or vehicle. Does this rock have lettering? And what is that if not a female figure, and a possible child and man near it?” –